The date formatting parameters passed to the two formatting functions can take many different formats. A formatting string can contain several key strings, which will be replaced with date components. The following are key strings which are currently supported:

DD
MM
YYYY
DAY
MONTH
DDEXT
DMY
MDY
YMD
MABV
DABV

The first three are tranlated into the numerical day/month/year strings. The DAY format is translated into the day of the week name, and MONTH is the month name. DDEXT is the day with the appropriate suffix, eg 1st, 22nd or 13th. DMY, MDY and YMD default to '13-09-1965' (DMY) style strings. MABV and DABV provide 3 letter abbreviations of MONTH and DAY respectively.

Internal to this module is some date comparison code. As a consequence this requires some date modules that can handle a wide range of dates. There are three modules which are tested for you, these are, in order of preference, DateTime, Date::ICal and Time::Local.

Each module has the ability to handle dates, although only Time::Local exists in the core release of Perl. Unfortunately Time::Local is limited by the Operating System. On a 32bit machine this limit means dates before 1st January 1902 and after 31st December 2037 will not be represented. If this date range is well within your scope, then you can safely allow the module to use Time::Local. However, should you require a date range that exceedes this range, then it is recommended that you install one of the two other modules.

There are no known bugs at the time of this release. However, if you spot a bug or are experiencing difficulties that are not explained within the POD documentation, please submit a bug to the RT system (see link below). However, it would help greatly if you are able to pinpoint problems or even supply a patch.

Fixes are dependent upon their severity and my availability. Should a fix not be forthcoming, please feel free to (politely) remind me by sending an email to barbie@cpan.org .

Dave Cross, <dave at dave.org> for creating Calendar::Simple, the newbie poster on a technical message board who inspired me to write the original wrapper code and Richard Clamp <richardc at unixbeard.co.uk> for testing the beta versions.